This sprightly evening kicks off what the week's co-organiser, Michael Pennington, calls "a birthday party in six parts": a nightly celebration, performances and talks, of Anton Chekhov, born in January 1860. But the event also offers a good time in a good cause: restoration of his Yalta villa, shown by biographer Rosamund Bartlett to be in a state of serious disrepair.

Michael Frayn hosted the first evening, a set of Chekhov's vaudevilles or farces written in the 1880s. But, although Chekhov was dismissive of these prentice money-spinners, they reveal his innate gift for blending the serious and the comic.

In Swan Song, Pennington is both absurd and touching as a veteran thesp in an darkened theatre who dwells on the evanescence of his craft while recalling the grandeur of his Lear. And David Horovitch, all tics and nervous winks, is brilliant in The Evils of Tobacco, in which a hen-pecked lecturer confides his travails.

At other times, Chekhov's aim was to make people laugh. In Drama, Miriam Margolyes is at her magnificent best as an unstoppable playwright reading to a captive author: as her hero announces "I've come to talk to you about various matters of public hygiene", you see Horovitch develop a murderous itch.

Both reappear in the more familiar, but equally hilarious The Proposal in which a suitor and his intended lapse into bilious quarrels. Plots, the fantasies of a doctor, is not on the same level, but is vividly performed by Steve McNeil.

Frayn, who translated the pieces, presides over the evening. It offers the perfect curtain-raiser to a stellar week by reminding us that, even in farcical trifles, Chekhov intimated his genius.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 19 January 2010. Chekhov was born in 1860, not 1850. This has been corrected.